The First Geneticists Enters the Race to Sequence 100 Genomes of 100 Centenarians for Less than $1,000 Each

This is Dr. Johnathan Rothberg of Life Technologies who is the first researcher to oficciall register for participation in the Archon Genomics X Prize. The Archon Genomics Prize is an award given by the X Prize Foundation for the first man to sequence 100 whole genomes of centenarians in less than 30 day for $1,000 or less. BBS reports that Dr. Rothberg believes this may be a good start towards finding the “fountains of youth”.

I found it very interesting that Dr. Craig Venter is the originator of the prize. This may be an indication that he is pro-longevity in mind. We’ve already known that he is one of the greatest biologists, but this may serve as an indication that he is in favor of life extention technologies. It would be really great if he worked in this area himself, because ssynthetic biology holds a lot of promise for advancing the longevity technologies. Just imagine a bacteria that lives together with the cells and adds the “good” longevity proteins and suppresses the production of the “bad” aging ones. There’s a chance we can make the cells live longer. Of course, gene regulation is extremely complicated, but one can always start with a simple model and see if it works.

We Created the Longevity Party

We made the first step towards the creation of the Longevity Party. On July, 19 the initiative group of 10 people gathered together in Moscow to establish the first political party aimed at extending human lifespan using technological advances. Among these 10 people were Mikhail Batin, Alexey Turchin, Leonid Kaganov and Elena Milova. This is the very first step in the long and hard process of legally registering a political party. I believe this is one of the most important things that happened in the past few years in fighting aging. Nowhere in the world never before people expressed their desire to life longer in a form of a political movement.

The main goal of the Longevity Party is to increase human lifespan so that people could live for as long as they would like to and remain young and healthy. We would like to achieve this goal by promoting scientific research and technological advances in regenerative medicine, genetics of aging and longevity, neuroscience, computer modeling of biological processes and other areas of life extension. Longevity Party is 100% transhumanist party.

There are so many things that we need to do in order to legally register the Party, and we have already started doing them. I will be posting the updates as frequently as possible. Next big thing we need to finalize is the Program of the Party. Then we have to have at least 2 people in 42 regions of Russia as representatives of the Party and have the founding meeting after which the Party can be registered and eventually appear in the voting ballots.

Our goal is to influence the authorities to support life extension technologies and increase funding for research aimed at improving people’s health and extending longevity.

Join us. Together we will win. Longevity Party must be a global initiative.